Emily Martin, in her article “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,” (Signs 16(3), 1991, p. 485-501) critiques the way biological texts generally portray sperm as active, brave adventurers and eggs as passive damsels waiting for a sperm to save her lest she be flushed out as waste during menstruation.
NEW: For example, this cartoon was linked in our comments by Noumenon:
As Noumenon notes, the first sperm to arrive is not necessarily the one that “wins” the right to merge with the egg. More often than not, it is not because the necessary chemical reaction that allows fertilization needs many sperm, not just one.
Further, sperm do not swim. They are not making a break for the egg. They do not have brains, desires, or goals. Their “tails” are randomly thrashing around due to the energy provided by the fluid produced by the prostate gland. They go in every direction (not just toward the sperm) and only by random chance do some of them end up at the egg.
ALSO NEW: Here is a clip from The Family Guy showing Stewie as a sperm (so apparently the sperm contains all of the future of the identity of the individual) or, more accurately, a spermship, competing with other sperm to capture the egg:
Martin mentions that one of the few (non-scientific) cultural depictions of sperm that doesn’t draw on this imagery is in Woody Allen’s movie “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* *But Were Afraid to Ask,” where Allen plays the part of a sperm frightened of going out to face contraceptives or the possibility that it’s a false alarm (masturbation, gay sex) that won’t even get him close to an egg.
Here’s a clip from the movie showing that scene:
I’m going to show it the day we discuss Martin’s article in my women’s studies class when we address the way women’s bodies have been historically constructed, both scientifically and non-scientifically.
AND ALSO NEW: In a comment Ranah pointed out this image (found here), which depicts how the egg plays a much more complex part in guiding some sperm in while limiting access to others than common perceptions of fertilization recognize:
Thanks, Ranah!
See also this Viagra ad that shows a sperm exploding an egg open.
16 Comments
In defense of science here, they’ve only recently found out about the ovum’s chemical signalling mechanisms, which actually would have been hard to find much before now (given the prior state of the art in molecular biology), even had people been looking. “Construction” aside, parsimony would actually dictate the previous explanation.
Uh.. this blog is cool and all but sometimes it feels like you are pushing it. I mean, what science text anthropomorphizes sperm and eggs the way you described? I’ve never noticed any “brave sperm” or “egg in distress” undertone. It just happens the way it happens, sperm swims to find the egg, which is just there waiting, big deal.
And even if someone does attributes the quality of “brave” to the sperm (which is silly), doesn’t mean he is tapping on gender stereotypes, he is just describing what happens.
Martin actually did a textual analysis–all those images of sperm and eggs (as well as many, many others that are beyond silly) came from actual biology or medical texts or articles that she cites.
And the whole point of her article is that it turns out it DOESN’T just happen like that–it turns out BOTH the egg and sperm are active, the egg binds the sperm to it (as opposed to passively sitting there waiting), and the proteins on the sperm and membranes on the egg interlock together. Implying that the egg does nothing but sit around, and the strong, aggressive sperm “penetrates it” (which turns out to not really be what happens–evidence is that sperm are not actually very strong at moving forward, and if eggs did not actively bind to them, they wouldn’t get through the membrane on their own) is a cultural story we tell over and over because it falls into line with what we think men and women are like.
As for the sperm being “brave” (or the other ways it was described)…it’s not a human. It has no emotions or motivations that can be described as brave, cowardly, or anything else.
Martin does a better job explaining all this than I do, which is why I cited her article. It’s a classic in gender studies.
Okay, when I said “sit around” I was talking about this specific quality of the egg when compared to the sperm. The sperm does actually move torwards the egg, the egg doesn’t go to the sperm. Obviously, after there is contact, the egg does something. And that is talked about just the same as the part about the sperm swimming torwards the egg, because it is all part of the process.
And the usage of the word brave (which I have never seen in biological texts describing the process) is just a metaphor, so you have to look at what it means. Obviously doesn’t mean that the sperm is a brave little dude. The word brave there would be just to convey the idea that there’s a huge risk that each individual sperm never makes it to it’s destination.
The thing is, though, that Martin DID find biology and medical texts/articles that talk about the sperm like brave little dudes, and the eggs as either totally passive OR as a mistress-in-waiting (I don’t have the article in front of me to provide the exact wording, but I know one talked about an egg waiting to be “rescued” by a sperm, lest it go to waste). Several talked about the egg membrane as its “vestments,” which is just…weird, given “vestment” is usually used to describe religious garments. I promise, I wasn’t just making up the discourse/language I was referring to–it actually exists and is all cited and referenced and everything. I swear!
Guess I’ll take a look at. Do you know where can I find it on the internet? I believe finding it on any library where I live (Brazil) would be hard.
But anyways, I always get jumpy when I see stuff like “science is discriminatory saying this and that”. I mean, science is a method, not a group of people. And yeah, I get it that sometimes people use it to reffer to the scientific community, but that’s just generalizing, specially in a field that is so broad.
Oh, it’s always good to be skeptical of things–I get you there. I’ll see if I have a PDF version or find a link to it somewhere for you.
I’ve always been fond of the Margaret Atwood passage about this (”Adventure Story”, found in the collection Good Bones) which though it does paint the protagonists as adventurers, points out that “You may think I’m talking about male bonding, or war, but no; half of these are female…”
I just saw the “brave little sperm” trope on an episode of Family Guy this Monday. Stewie, the hyper-intelligent, destructive, child genius, was celebrating his first birthday. He reminisced about his life in the womb and before, when he was apparently a tiny pilot in a sperm-shaped aircraft.
Stewie’s flashback showed him piloting his sperm ship toward the egg and firing at it in a scene reminiscent of the scene in Star Wars where Luke tries to explode the Death Star. He think thinks about being sucked in and “trapped” inside the egg. The relationship between sperm and egg is shown as adversarial, the egg evil, hungry and encompassing, not unlike a vagina dentata.
Of course, this flashback occurs in the context of a cartoon in which everything is supposed to be exaggerated and humorous. However, the fact remains that the humorous exaggeration is presented with gratuitous violence and misogyny. You might argue that violence and misogyny are part of Stewie’s character, which they are, but the flashback does not develop Stewie’s violence and misogyny in a way peculiar to his personality. Instead it just recycles wholesale a tired, sexist cliche about human reproduction.
Here’s a YouTube clip of the episode I was talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gngh8k1H-kg
Here’s another example of how we think about sperm and eggs:
I didn’t realize that I was thinking about this in cultural terms till my brother pointed out that the first, fastest, strongest sperm doesn’t fertilize the egg — it takes a few to soften it up first. But our cultural views about who should get to reproduce makes this cartoon seem plausible instead of bad science.
Here’s another example of how we think about sperm and eggs:
http://j-walkblog.com/images2/MJ2Za9Vhmclok4zkVRIyx0MC_400.jpg
I didn’t realize that I was thinking about this in cultural terms till my brother pointed out that the first, fastest, strongest sperm doesn’t fertilize the egg — it takes a few to soften it up first. But our cultural views about who should get to reproduce makes this cartoon seem plausible instead of bad science.
Why doesn’t my comment appear? I took the hyperlinks out… there’s nothing that says comments are screened.
Here’s another example of how we think about sperm and eggs:
http:// j-walkblog.com/images2/MJ2Za9Vhmclok4zkVRIyx0MC_400.jpg
I didn’t realize that I was thinking about this in cultural terms till my brother pointed out that the first, fastest, strongest sperm doesn’t fertilize the egg — it takes a few to soften it up first. But our cultural views about who should get to reproduce makes this cartoon seem plausible instead of bad science.
Oh well, at least the second repost was worthwhile, since it seems tags don’t post — on this blog especially, it would be handy if they did, or warned you that they don’t.
That was supposed to be “image” tags that don’t post. I’ll shut up now.
The egg carefully gives access and selects the sperm:
http://e-vestnik.bg/imgs/zdrave/Spermograma-060.jpg
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